Sunday, May 18, 2014

This commencement season,
the dominant narrative has centered on successful student campaigns to force
withdrawals and disinvitations of commencement speakers. Haverford, Rutgers,
Smith, Brandeis. It’s the wrong narrative—or, at least, it’s incomplete. What’s
shocked me has been the extent to which these examples of student self-activity
have incited university professors and administrators to publicize a barely
concealed disdain for students. This disdain saturates every stupid, snarky
word of Stephen Carter’s “Dear
Class of 2014: Thanks for Not Disinviting Me”; it resounds in William Bowen’s commencement
sermon to Haverford College. In a world where dads and the dad-like wring
their hands over those sillybilly millenials, apathetic spoiled and
self-absorbed, somehow students' attempt to recode the parameters of public spectacle
has been troped as an exercise in narcissism. It’s the selfie generation, after
all.

If the university once
(understood itself to have) functioned as the place where humans left their
self-incurred immaturity, as Kant might put it, if it once served as the place
where students prepared themselves to participate in public life, the Dads of
higher ed are now insisting with the primness of a period-piece dowager that
students should be seen and not heard. Literally. Bowen recalls a commencement protest
over the grant of an honorary degree to a Nixonite in the 70s. (You can hear the daddishness: “back in my day…”)
Happily, the “protestors were respectful (mostly), and chose to express their
displeasure, by simply standing and turning their backs when the Secretary was
recognized.” If ed gurus today salivate over tech-leveraged “disruption,” what
Bowen admires about these human swivels is their decision “to express their
opinion in a non-disruptive fashion.” No noise, just image, and the spectacle went on, with Princeton
investing a Nixonite with an honorary degree.

I’ve been insisting on the
term spectacle because, as everyone knows, the operative fiction of Carter’s
letter and Bowen’s sermon is bullshit. Not even your liberalist liberal, your
deliberativest deliberative democrat, could in good faith claim that
commencement speeches are scenes of open debate. They are, rather, capstone
moments where the university takes on a body, incorporates itself, and seeks to
establish the conditions of its corporate reproducibility. A lovely experience
validating 240k in cash or debt, a spectacle for parents and future donors—but
hardly a scene of debate or discussion! Just a droning message, some platitudes,
and the implicit promise that the fundraising office will soon track you down.

Thus, Carter’s sarcastic
reminder that students are “graduating into a world of enormous complexity and
conflict,” his sarcastic injunction that childish student protestors not “sweep
away complexity and nuance’”—all of this is the height of cynical bullshit. I
can’t imagine that there’s a student protestor who would not have jumped at the
chance to address the middlebrow dads of the world in the august pages of BloombergView, to be recognized as mature
enough to participate in the dads’ super-smart high-intensity debates, nuanced
and complex as they are. (I can’t imagine, moreover, that there’s a single
student protesting the IMF’s Lagarde who is not
aware of the US’s historical involvement in it, I can’t imagine that there’s a
single protestor who would not be happy to disinvite the US—as Carter suggests
students would not be—should the Statue of Liberty or something try to give a
commencement speech. But Professor Carter insists on his students’ stupidity,
their lack of sophisticated thinking. Ad te fabula…)

To demand nuance from those
without secure access to official publics is to inhibit access to publicness as
such. But Carter and Bowen don’t want publicness; they want an ideological plebiscite.
One in which students are free to say yes or no (or nothing, which counts as a
yes) to the options presented, sure, but they first need to be presented with
the options—options cooked up off screen, in the President’s office, with the
Board of Trustees, with the Dean of Student Life, wherever. They can turn their
backs, give a thumbs down, maybe the unruly will even boo (with pearls clutched
at Princeton), but first they have to listen. Bowen reserves particular ire for
the students’ decision to send Birgeneau a list of demands—that is, for their
attempt to intervene into public discourse in a way exceeding the axiomatics of
yea or nay. In a certain way, then, universities are preparing students for the forms of depleted publicness
available to Mature Nuanced Dads across ‘Merica: raging at television screens
and the de facto binary act of punching holes in ballots. (Let’s keep that in
mind: the pinnacle of official political being for most US subjects is so
semantically winnowed that its activity is prelinguistic. Nuance not required.)

And so the bankrupt cynicism
of claims that students immaturely, impulsively, undemocratically violated the
norms of democratic publicness. To think that fostering a culture of public
debate is a university pedagogical ideal is by turns hilarious and desperately
sad when we consider the story that put Bowen on Haverford’s stage and the
story he told while up there. Bowen spoke because Haverford students didn’t
want Birgeneau, the former chancellor of UC Berkeley who let his cops baton
student Occupiers in 2011, to speak. Bowen’s good-ole-days memory, meanwhile,
recalls the chill in campus activism in the 70s—in the wake, that is, of Kent
State. (The dignified, “non-disruptive” protest of turning one’s back is also
one that won’t get you shot or beat.) The campus public has been structured
dismantled; when it threatens to reappear, it is hyper-policed. Or University
Dads write letters in the rag of a billionaire’s news corporation.

This round of student
disinvitation performatively refuses the pseudo-conversion of an ideological
plebiscite into an ersatz public. That they can recognize the difference is
miraculous, because it would appear, from Carter and Bowen’s responses, that
university educators flip to the end of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” when
assembling their pedagogy: “Argue about whatever you like as much as you like,
but obey!” This time, though, the obedience that University Dads demand would
entail students forsaking the already minimal space they once possessed.

I’m not being as coherent as
I‘d like. Maybe not as nuanced as Carter would demand. There’s much more to be
said about the decimation of publicness in the US, the way it’s been
militarized and policed to hell. About the university’s betrayal of its
mission. About how nuance is meaningless in a world subsumed into the idiotic
violence of pure command. And on and on.

But I’m more just angry,
pissed off, that my colleagues in higher education are so committed to
maintaining their dad-power that they write off those students most committed to opening a democratic
horizon as democracy’s greatest traitors. The idea persists that any student
with an idea is actually a kid with a tantrum; that student protesting is super
chic and just a blast; that responding to administration power is a kind of
oedipal thing that silly kids do, because they must, to feel (but not actually
be; no, not yet) like adults.

What Carter and Bowen refuse
to acknowledge are the doubtless long hours students spent in self-organized
meetings, arguing, drafting and re-drafting statements, figuring out what it
was they in fact wanted. What they can’t feel, and don’t care to feel, is the
scorn reserved for student activists on campus. But the scorn isn’t as bad as
the indifference, an indifference experienced in more long hours trying to hand
fliers to people who will probably trash them immediately, in conversations
with unreceptive classmates and student groups and, yes, most professors and
administrators. An indifference induced by the discourse that students are just
consumers, and primarily consumers of booze and sex—a discourse of the dads
that pretends to lament what it secretly hopes to reproduce.

And what they really, truly
cannot see is the fear, and the extraordinary and ordinary courages that match
it. The fear of isolation and mockery, to be sure. But also the simple fear
that necessarily runs alongside the act of becoming political in a space that
abjects politics—of becoming public in a world evacuated of publicness. The voices
that trembled when they first began mic-checking a speaker, only to crescendo
by the end. The moment of doubt that arrives just before the email is sent to
the student paper…but sent it is. Even just approaching someone with a flier is
a small breech of neoliberal norms, an act requiring a corresponding charge of
bravery.

That these students exist at
all is miraculous. As always, it’s the educator who must be educated. Carter
and Bowen should thank them for the lesson. For it might not be too long,
perhaps, before they take Bowen’s advice and turn their backs on these
spectacles of depleted publicity—only to make a break for the undercommons from
which they emerged.

Monday, May 5, 2014

In the wake of responses to
Tal Fortgang’s “Why
I’ll Never Apologize for My White Privilege,” I want to think, very
briefly, about what kind of locution “Check your privilege” is. What do we
mean, and mean to say, when we say it? What’s at stake for me, as should be
obvious and as is usual around here, is not coming to an apologetics for a
terrible bourgie racist, but rather honing the efficacy of a key instrument of
today’s anti-racist repertoire—which is to say, interrupting the process by
which an anti-racist technique becomes functional for racial liberalism.

As is evident in his essay,
Fortgang responds to the charge “Check your privilege!” as a misinterpellation.
That is, the locution charges him (by “reprimand[ing]” him, as he puts it) to
inhabit a position with which he cannot identify. The reasons for this
inability to identify are in part ideological (meritocracy is a thing for him)
but are, more robustly, biographical: “So to find out what they are saying, I
decided to take their advice. I actually went and checked the origins of my
privileged existence, to empathize with those whose underdog stories I can’t
possibly comprehend.” His move, basically, is to oppose his privileged present
with his family’s underprivileged past. To be sure, Fortgang’s recourse to
narration disavows the privilege entailed in inhabiting legible and stable kin
structures, structures that transmit themselves in and as time, but let’s let
that slide for the moment; it’s the method that I want to think about.
Interrupting privilege talk’s synchronic present with the temporality of a
family’s history, Fortgang’s point is to mark the gap between contemporary
modes of mapping structure and lived relations to it. For Fortgang, the
locution “Check your privilege!” violently closes this gap. It’s not for
nothing that he figures its use as a high-speed missile, a missile to be lobbed
from a drone—“The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends
recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my
pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness”—for the locution traverses the space between structure and subjectivity that
he cannot cognitively or ethically travel. But the phrase, as a missile, misses
what it hits; or, rather, it hits by missing. For Fortgang is not privileged, no, not a bit, for his
roots are with the underprivileged, the unprivileged, and he lives his relation
to the world as such.

If Fortgang were to give a
linguistic term to this locution, it would be “insult.” I’ve written about the
insult before;
what I want to return to here is how insulting functions precisely through the
lack of fit between sign, referent, and signified. As Agamben puts it in his
little essay on friendship, an insult “is effective precisely because it does
not function as a constative utterance…it uses language in order to give a name
in such a way that the named cannot accept his name, and against which he
cannot defend himself.” For Fortgang, the performative locution (“Check your
privilege!”) is underwritten by an unearned constative (“You have privilege.”)
that, in his case, converts privilege-checking from a mode of regulating
discourse to a form of insult. An imposition of an improper name, a forced
inclusion into an improper set. Put differently, an alternative title to his
essay could easily have been “Why I am not an Asshole”—for Fortgang, the linguistic
operation of privilege-checking and name-calling are functionally identical.

Fortgang’s inability to
accept “privileged” as a proper naming of his social position can help us think
through some limits to how privilege checking functions today. We can see these
limits, for instance, in one
Salon response to Fortgang, which begins, “A college student who doesn’t
believe in the existence of structural racism or white supremacy wrote an essay
about why he would “never apologize” for his white privilege…” We see them
again in Jezebel’s response, “To
the Privileged Princeton Kid,” which takes the form of a letter, a
second-person address intended to educate this “kid” into an alternative form
of subjectivity. In both cases, what’s at stake is inducing an imaginative relationship
(he “doesn’t believe”) or an ethical relationship (the proper “you” who would
non-allergically get his privilege checked) to social and political structure. The
problem is that Fortgang’s point persists: he cannot maintain an imaginative or ethical relationship to
structure. And with good reason. After all, he’s being asked to claim
authorship for, and mark his authorization by, a structure that he didn’t will,
a structure that exceeds his capacity to will—a political structure that is
indifferent to the ethical relationship one establishes with it. In other
words, Fortgang’s anti-liberal reception of “Check your privilege!” usefully
marks the disarticulation between the ethical and the political, between an
individual’s lived relation to the world and the political structures that
sustain or constrain it. When Fortgang asserts the excessiveness of history to
privilege’s present, what he’s saying is: I can’t do shit about it. And he can’t.

The problem with the kind of
privilege-checking that Fortgang critiques is that it asks subjects to maintain
an ethical relationship to a dispersed structure that exceeds the practical or
phenomenological horizons of the ethical. Fortgang’s allergic reaction to
privilege-checking is the mirror image of white anti-racist liberal voluntarists—the
kind we all love to critique—who posit their reformed ethical relation to
whiteness as a politics. In either case, the substitution of the ethical for
the political obscures the fact that it’s not possible to maintain an ethical
relationship to whiteness, because whiteness is nothing less—as we get from
Fanon—than the dissolution of ethical relationality. Just think: What would it
actually mean for someone like Fortgang to maintain an ethical relationship to
his whiteness, his maleness, his money? Why would we even want him to? Put in phenomenological
terms, I can only live right with my whiteness when I live against it, but this
counter-action is never derivable from myself. It comes from outside, in the
establishment of an oppositional political relationship, one that exceeds my
individual capacities of cognitive, imaginative, or ethical relation.

And it is maintaining a
political relationship, I think, that the locution intended from the beginning,
from its origins in activist practice. “Check your privilege!” is an activists’
tool for activists. It functions less to put power into an ethical relation
with its own terribleness than it works to keep our counter-power free from
residual traces of the world we’re trying to destroy. It’s not a locution
intended to traverse the friend/enemy divide in order to call the powerful to dubious
acts of moral accountancy. It’s neither a reprimand nor an insult. Rather, “Check
your privilege!” is a speech-act that intends the maintenance of anti-racist,
anti-misogynist, anti-capitalist groups against the persistent threat of
auto-corruption. One only says “Check your privilege!” to comrades, to those
with whom you co-incline.
It’s a locution that keeps political lines of communication clear from all of
the fucked-up shit we bring, and can’t not bring, to our collectivities. In
Jakobson’s terms, the function of “Check your privilege!” is phatic, a way of
saying, “I can’t hear you; you’re adopting an idiom unintelligible from the
perspective of our politics.” That is, the locution informs the addressee of
the conditions under which his words will be legible as a communicative act,
and does so after those conditions have been broken. The point of the locution is
to repair a political relation that has been interrupted, not simply to
regulate discourse or inspire an ethical consciousness that can never actually
be ethical. And it only makes sense within this political frame, where it works
powerfully. Otherwise, it’s just a liberal moralization of the political.

A simple way of putting
this: One checks the privileges of one’s friends. One destroys those of one’s enemies.
One does the former in the service of the latter.